Abstract This session will outline a unit of work for the junior secondary English classroom based on Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott”. Written in 1843, the poem conjures up the legendary world of King Arthur and “many towered Camelot” as the setting for the tragic tale of the beautiful but doomed lady of the title. The end of the poem finds her dead but Sir Lancelot thought that she had “a lovely face”.
The unit could run for several weeks or for a whole term. The longer version is envisaged as employing writing workshop procedures adapted from Nancy Atwell’s 1987 book “In the Middle: Writing, Reading and Learning with Adolescents.” These procedures stress student choice and are aimed at ensuring that the time and effort that teachers invest in marking make a real contribution to student learning. Imaginative re-creation is the basis for a collection of writing tasks covering a range of narrative and non narrative text types and often there is potential for a smidgen of playful anachronism.
A consideration of functional grammar is a key element in the analysis and discussion of the textual features of a series of teacher-written genre models.
Learning language with the Lady of Shalott
Abstract
This session will outline a unit of work for the junior secondary English classroom based on Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott”. Written in 1843, the poem conjures up the legendary world of King Arthur and “many towered Camelot” as the setting for the tragic tale of the beautiful but doomed lady of the title. The end of the poem finds her dead but Sir Lancelot thought that she had “a lovely face”.
The unit could run for several weeks or for a whole term. The longer version is envisaged as employing writing workshop procedures adapted from Nancy Atwell’s 1987 book “In the Middle: Writing, Reading and Learning with Adolescents.” These procedures stress student choice and are aimed at ensuring that the time and effort that teachers invest in marking make a real contribution to student learning. Imaginative re-creation is the basis for a collection of writing tasks covering a range of narrative and non narrative text types and often there is potential for a smidgen of playful anachronism.
A consideration of functional grammar is a key element in the analysis and discussion of the textual features of a series of teacher-written genre models.
Garry Collins gazco48@bigpond.net.au
Some resources are provided below.
The following are genre samples generated from the poem: